Life is a funny thing, right? You think you are bowling along quite happily and then CRUNCH. You hit a road block, a speed bump, a lamp post. Whatever you want to call it. Something that stops you in your tracks and makes you wonder how you will get past it.
Well, that happened to me a few years ago when my whole networking region was going to shit and I didn’t know how to fix it.
I’d been a Regional Leader for a few months and was heading off to a Regional Leaders meeting in Taunton, which is where 4N have their HQ. Now, Taunton is a BLOODY long way from Sleaford, where I live, and so I decided to take the train so I could get some work done on the way there and back. The journey down was uneventful, although I started to feel a bit ‘off’ when I was crossing London, and by the time I got to Taunton I was feeling a bit grim. I had a good evening catching up with my fellow RLs and went off to bed.
I woke up feeling like DEATH.
Horrendous, feverish cold, raging headache & sore throat and a voice that sounded like I’d been on the Capstan Full Strength all night.
This is relevant, dear reader, because of what happened next.
One of the things we are asked to do at these meetings is sum up our region’s activity/successes etc in a short briefing. I’d planned to spin the fact that my region was falling apart in an upbeat and positive way. I’d kind of sketched out the words I wanted to use.
What I hadn’t counted on was feeling like shit. All I wanted to do was go home, have a long bath & go to bed.
Instead, I had an all day meeting to get through and a 5 hour train journey at the end of it. Joy.
So by the time it got to my turn to brief my fellow RLs – let’s just say I really wasn’t in the mood. I’d listened to several briefings by now and everyone was hunky dory. No one was having any problems. Everything was just peachy.
Now to put this into some context, this is why my region was going to hell at the time:
- Passporters weren’t passporting. They were just going to the same groups over and over and over. It was killing the energy in my groups.
- Team members weren’t passporting – they were just going to their own groups and bitching endlessly about how other team members didn’t support theirs.
- Team members were just in the role for the membership day rewards and not for the opportunity to build their businesses.
- I had demoralised Area Leaders who were getting ready to, or had already thrown in the towel.
I was pushing treacle uphill ALL THE TIME. I was pissed off. And because I felt like hell, I let it rip in my briefing.
Big time.
I shared with my fellow leaders and the management team of 4N all my woes. All my frustrations. All the things that were broken in my region and my inability to fix them. I let rip with both barrels and let them have it.
Which made me feel a WHOLE lot better about that. Verbalising my frustration was really cathartic. Getting it out there that I was failing my region was exactly what I needed to do to make that real, make me own it and start to address it.
So as I sat through the rest of the day, gradually feeling worse and worse, mulling over why it had all gone so very wrong.
I knew I had two choices: Give Up or Get Stuck In.
I don’t do giving up. I’ve had a proper, massive road bump in my personal life recently and when I was chatting about it with my Mum, she said ‘that’s just you sweetheart, you’re a Weeble. You never fall down, you just roll with it and get straight back up’.
So I engaged my inner Weeble and looked at what I needed to do to put this right.
I wasn’t engaging enough with my leadership team. So I created an FB group and started to do just that.
I got off my backside and starting getting to more of my meetings in my region (it was a lot smaller then, I simply can’t get to all my meetings these days, I’d do nothing but network and that’s no good for business!).
I started talking to my team members about opportunity, reach, profile enhancement and all the things team membership offers for business growth.
But most specifically, I put my personal branding expertise into action. I dusted off my cape and had a look at what was missing. And then I realised it was really simple. My team members needed something to belong to. Something to believe in. Something to get behind and be proud of. They needed a tribe. To be part of a gang. To have something in common. Because if I could get them to do that, the rest of it would start to follow.
A couple of throw away comments at the RL meeting came back to me. That I was ‘looking after a region made up of farmers and potato pickers‘. That (I am not tall, and at the time, one of my GLs was even smaller than me) ‘its like networking in Hobbiton’. Which in some ways is very true. It got me thinking. It got me specifically thinking about hobbits. And, from there, The ’Shire was born.
Fast forward a few years and my region has grown massively. The ‘Shire is a thing. It’s a thing that my teamies, especially, talk about being a part of. There are some teamies and passporters who get all picky about being in different ‘shires, but THE ‘Shire is us all together, creating a ‘brand’ for our networking that we can use to get behind and enjoy being part of. We are all part of the same tribe. Which is a powerful thing.
Does it work?
Most of the time, yes. I’d be a liar if I tried to say it was all perfect, all the time, because it isn’t.
But when people start bitching about it – you know you are doing something right….;-)
Create your tribe. Make people want to be part of it. Look at what you need to do to build that tribe. Realise not everyone is going to want to be in it, or understand it, but build it anyway.
Then get out there and piss people off with it. Because if they are whinging about your tribe, its because they know it’s good.
And that feels good too.